The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

A Priest and A Data Geek Walk Into A Bar: Sneak Preview of Ken’s Esri User Conference Presentation

On Tuesday, July 9 at 11:15am, Ken Howard, our executive director and principal consultant, will deliver a presentation on data-grounded strategic missional planning at the Esri International User Conference in San Diego, CA.*

The presentation, “Grounding Discernment in Data: Strategic Missional Planning Using MapDash for Faith Communities” will describe how FaithX collaborated with Datastory to adapt interactive GIS technology to provide a platform and a process to help congregations and their judicatories learn the stories of their neighborhoods, identify missional opportunities and challenges emerging from those stories, and develop effective strategies for engaging them. Ken has been asked to deliver this 20-minute presentation as part of Esri’s Expo Spotlight Theater, which will also be spotlighting how other nonprofit organizations put GIS data to work in their respective areas of focus.

Since few of you will be attending the Esri User Conference and many of you have asked about the presentation, we thought it would be a good idea to give our faithful readers a sneak preview.  

Click here to view Grounding Discernment in Data

This presentation is in the form of a datastory:
an interactive presentation tool.
To view the presentation, simply scroll up through the “slides.”

*Esri is an international supplier of geographic information system software, web GIS, and geodatabase management applications.
The company is headquartered in Redlands, California.
The company was founded as Environmental Systems Research Institute
in 1969 as a land-use consulting firm.

Support FaithX

FaithX is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and Ken’s faith-based consulting practice at FaithX is done under an extension of ministry from the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

Want to learn more about missional opportunities
in your congregation’s neighborhood?
Click here for a free Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report

Want to learn how your judicatory can identify
emerging missional opportunities within its boundaries?
Click hereto schedule a free demo of MapDash for Faith Communities by Datastory
and Strategic Missional Planning by FaithX

FaithX & Datastory at New Story Festival

Just a little over a month from now, FaithX and Datastory will be participating in the New Story Festival, which is being held on March 29-31 in Austin, Texas.

The New Story Festival is a new annual gathering for community, creativity, and the common good: a bold experiment for a better world, embodying imagination, spirituality, social action, and playful connection – defined above all by the practice of love.

Ken Howard of FaithX and Matt Felton of Datastory will be program presenters and will also be exhibiting MapDash for Faith Communities. FaithX and Datastory are also festivals sponsors. And because FaithX is a partner organization, those who register through the FaithX portal get a $20 discount.

As the Festival website says, the world runs on stories – the narratives that fuel the ways we live in this world and relate to one another. Our stories can liberate or oppress, encourage reconciliation or further separation, inspire new life or even bring death. But when we become conscious of our stories, we can begin to change them. Believing that “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better,” the New Story Festival seeks to lead us into a better story – one that encourages growth and liberation, healing and harmony; a story where the downtrodden are uplifted and everyone is included.

[Read more…]

FaithX on the Road

Over the next several months, FaithX will be traveling to onsite strategic missional planning consultations and exhibiting (and speaking) at several large gatherings across the country, many of them with our collaborators Datastory.

Here is a taste of our schedule, both so far and into the months ahead:

January

Roman Catholic Diocese of Lansing Michigan. Ken is working with key leaders in the diocese to assist them in employing the missional intelligence capabilities of MapDash for Faith Communities as part of a several-month project that will culminate in a “State of the Diocese” report. The report will provide an assessment of the vitality of the diocese and its congregations, identify demographic trends and emerging missional opportunities, and describe strategies to address what they find.

February

2/20-2/23 – CEEP annual conference, Boston, Massachusetts. FaithX and Datastory will be exhibiting at the annual conference of the Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes (CEEP). Ken Howard and Steve Matthews of FaithX and Matt Felton of Datastory will be there demonstrating the power and the possibilities of MapDash for Faith Communities and strategic missional consulting.

March

3/29-3/31 – The New Story Festival, Austin, Texas. Ken and Matt will be delivering a presentation entitled “Datastories – How Missional Intelligence Can Help Us to Love Our Communities,” and will be exhibiting Datastory’s MapDash and FaithX’s strategic missional consulting. FaithX and Datastory are Festival Sponsors.

TBA – Episcopal Dioceses of Georgia and Central Gulf Coast at Valdosta, Georgia. This will be the third of four sessions of the dioceses’ Datastory Evangelism Project, in which both dioceses are using MapDash to identify emerging missional opportunities and challenges, and develop data-grounded strategies to engage with them.

Later in 2019

8/5-8/10 – ELCA Churchwide Assembly, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Planning is underway for FaithX and Datastory to exhibit at the biennial Church Wide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Matt Felton will again be representing Datastory, while Ken Howard and Mary Frances will be representing FaithX.

Join our mailing list and keep abreast of where we are going next.


For more information about MapDash for Faith Communities and strategic missional consulting, or to invite Ken Howard to speak at a conference, contact Ken Howard at ken@faithx.net.

FaithX Site Suffers Malware Attack… and a few of you can help

 

Late last week FaithX.net suffered a malware attack. The malware in question had an innocuous name – I mean “Hello Dolly” sounds harmless, right? Indeed, we didn’t realize it was an attack when we first discovered the program on our Plugins page. But it did one heck of a lot of damage – before we identified and removed it, about a third of our files we gone and the menu structure was scrambled.

Some of the files were old and unused. Some were simple and easily recreated. But one page in particular was a real loss…

 

Our “Testimonials Page”

Every link to our Testimonials page instead took us to the dreaded “404 Page Not Found” page. Better than the “white blog screen of death,” I suppose. But still quite a blow.

We’ve been able to find many of the lost testimonials in the sender’s original emails (so glad I’m so bad at deleting old emails). And we’ve restored many others from memory. But others are seemingly nowhere to be found.

 

So here’s how a select few of you can help…

If you are one of those people who provided us with a testimonial for MapDash for Faith Communities, our Missional Journey consulting program, or one of our consultants – Mary Frances, Steve Matthews, or me – and could send it to us again or recreate it, we would be forever grateful.

If you are not one of those people, but have been using MapDash or worked with one of us, or even had a demo and were impressed, and are willing to write a sentence or two about it, that also would make us very happy.

If you fall into either of those groups, and you want to help, just jot a few thoughtful words in an email and address it to ken@faithx.net, and you can be one of…

The Few, the Proud, the Testimonializers

FaithX Launches Peer-Reviewed Journal: Call for Board Members and Papers

After more than a year of planning, FaithX is launching a new peer-reviewed journal entitled Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry (SHERM) under the leadership of its research director, Darren M. Slade, who will serve as SHERM’s General Editor. The first order of business is a call for Board Members and Papers (more information on this below). But first a little bit of background on SHERM and its purpose.

 

What is SHERM?
SHERM is a biannual, not-for-profit, peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes the latest social scientific, historiographic, and ecclesiastic research on religious institutions and their practices. SHERM is dedicated to the critical and scholarly inquiry of historical and contemporary religious phenomena, both from within particular religious traditions and across cultural boundaries, so as to inform the broader socio-historical analysis of religion and its related fields of study.

 

What is SHERM’s Purpose?
Inspired by Ken’s recently published research paper, The Religion Singularity, the purpose of SHERM is to provide a scholarly medium for specialists to publish advanced studies on religious trends, theologies, rituals, philosophies, and cultural influences in the hopes of generating enthusiasm for the academic and vocational study of religion while fostering collegiality among religious specialists. Its mission is to provide academics, professionals, and nonspecialists with critical reflections and evidence-based insights into religion and ministry.

[Read more…]